I have been reading this week a striking book by
Erika Mann, entitled School for Barbarians, in which she describes the conditioning of the rising German generation. Her argument is that the German child today is being torn from the softening influences of the family and religion and manufactured by deliberate processes into an instrument of war. The effect upon the child himself is deplorable. " He is," she writes, " cruel but not courageous; hard but not firm in character; sly but not clever; unchildlike, not mature." The parents watch this destruction of their child's character in agonised silence; the children are unaware of what is being done to them. They are neither " gay nor very serious." And their shrill strained voices ring out in the community song of the Jungvolk :
" Wir werden weiter marschieren, wenn alles in Scherben fallt, Denn heute gehort uns Deutschland, and morgen die ganze Welt."
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